The Incoherent Right

Posted on June 25, 2019 by thezman

In a democracy, all political debate is a debate over morality, as what holds democracy together is a civic religion. The people agree to a set of political arrangements because they agree those are the right way to organize society. That’s right as in morally correct, not empirically correct. Democracy has been sold as the best form of government, because it achieves the most happiness and opportunity for the most amount of people. That’s a moral argument, not an empirical one.

This is why the ruling class is endlessly talking about what is good for democracy or what is a threat to democracy. This is all code for morality. When they use the word democracy, they don’t mean the mechanics of selecting people for public office. They mean the expression of the general will, that magical force upon which modern liberal democracy is built. The general will is the expression of the general morality of the people, the framework that defines society and the lives of the citizens.

It’s why rational arguments rarely carry the day in democracy. Debate in democratic systems is about what is the right thing to do in terms of morality, rather than what is best for some practical reason. Even economics, which should focus on base concerns like making money and overall prosperity, ends up sounding like a mystery cult, where adherents worship the economy. The so-called conservatives are willing to excuse the most monstrous things, if it is good for the economy.

The moral marketplace is the only marketplace that matters in a modern liberal democracy. Even someone like Ocasio-Cortez understands this fact. She famously said in response to criticism of her many factual errors, “If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

It should be noted that the conservatives love mocking Cortez for this statement, but it is self-mockery. Unlike them, she actually understands the nature of political debate in a modern liberal democracy. Facts and reason are not all that important. If they were, the Athenians would never have agreed to attack Sicily. What matters is moral persuasion and emotional resonance. Politics in a liberal democracy is theater, not science. The fact that conservatives don’t get that helps explain their demise.

This truth about liberal democracy is why Buckley-style conservatism has been a failure since the end of the Cold War. In the one area it held the moral high ground against radicalism, the fight over communism, it was able to carry the day. The conservatives could control the moral framing with regards to the Soviets. America abandoned all of its republican ideals, becoming a global empire, in order to defeat global communism. That shows the power of morality in a liberal democracy.

In all other areas, however, the so-called conservatives were happy to give way to the radicals, allowing them to define the moral framework. This is why the Official Right has been such a failure since the 1990’s. The Left controls morality, so the Right must always find some way to fit into that morality. That either means abandoning the field by joining the libertarians on the sidelines or embracing yesterday’s radicalism as today’s timeless conservative principle. The Right is the toady of the Left.

It’s also why Buckley conservatism is in a crisis. You can see it in this Kevin Williamson piece on who are the real racists. Like David French, Williamson is one of the clown princes of modern conservatism, regularly declaring nutty things on-line to the amusement of dissidents. In this case, he is doing the old DR3 gag, claiming that those segregationist politicians from the last century were not real conservatives. After all, everyone knows that they were Democrats! That means they could not be conservatives.

Like all of today’s conservatives, Williamson believes anti-racism is the highest conservative virtue. In fact, what’s left of the Buckley crowd has embraced the egalitarianism of the Left to the point where they are to the left of the Progressive on the race issue. The modern conservative cannot hold a single position until they find a black guy to endorse it. They seem to have decided that the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance is a documentary on the lost writings of Edmund Burke.

The point of that Williamson article is not to make some factual or even moral argument against the Left. It is all about displaying the anti-racist plumage of the writer. It’s the same game you see with left-wing comedy shows. The performer shows off his moral superiority and the audience is flattered, so they cheer. It’s moral peacocking. The difference between conservatives and a peacock is that when a peacock displays his plumage, it is sign of courage. When conservatives do it, it is a sign of obedience.

This is why Buckley Conservatism is in a crisis, headed for the dustbin of history. In order to be in opposition to the ruling orthodoxy, you have to be at odds with at least some of its moral foundation. That means having an independent base of morality. In America, the Right used to rely on Christianity, tradition and America’s frontier culture, but those were abandoned as the Left anathematized each one in turn. That leaves the Right arguing from the same moral basis as the Left, which is why they are nothing but an echo now.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I now have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Our Interregnum

Posted on June 24, 2019 by thezman

One of the most remarkable things to happen in the West since the end of the Cold War has been the rise of identity politics over the last half decade. It is remarkable for a couple of reasons. One is that it has emerged in what economists consider to be a time of unrivaled prosperity. People should be happy and content, rather than angry, with post-national liberal democracy. A central tenet of liberal democracy is that the end point of human activity is to create a world of material plenty.

The other remarkable aspect is these movements are flourishing in the face of strong moral prohibition, often backed by force. It’s literally dangerous to be an identitarian in most of the West now. America is now a land that bans books and subjects dissenters to internal banishment. The titans of industry are studying China for ways to suppress internal dissent. Despite these efforts to anathematize identity politics, white people throughout the West are embracing identity politics.

The aggressive assault on dissidents is a direct result of the unpreparedness of the ruling classes. They really were convinced they had ushered in the post-historical moment as imagined by Francis Fukuyama. The great battles of political economy in the 20th century were settled. All the “isms” had been vanquished by liberalism and there was nothing left to discuss. The sudden reappearance of old cultures and old ideas about how people should organize themselves was like seeing a ghost.

Now, this is a good time to note that the phrase “identity politics” has been kicking around American political circles for decades. In the mouths of conservatives, it was always part of the grift they have been running on white people. It looks like an attack on left-wing tactics, but in reality it is an endorsement of Progressive morality. For the Left, it was always a cover for anti-white agitation. They could not come out directly in favor of anti-white polices, but non-white camp followers were free to do it.

The success of this game of good cop – bad cop played by the American political class is another reason they remain baffled by what’s happening. This game has worked for so long, its sudden failure is like the sun rising in the west all of a sudden. Perhaps a better metaphor is it seems as if all swans are now black. Everywhere political elites turn, the world is no longer as they imagined it. All the axioms upon which they based their world view are suddenly being called into question.

It turns out that Fukuyama was sort of right after all. The West had reached an endpoint after the Cold War. It was not the end of a great ideological battle, but the end point of the great multicultural project launched by the Frankfurt School following World War II. The West, particularly America, had become fully actualized as multicultural societies. They no longer possessed a core identity, based in biology, which informed their politics or restrained their politicians. It was just one big open marketplace.

The trouble is, you cannot have a nation without a sovereign identity and there can be no sovereign identity without a nation. This is the core insight of multiculturalism, which was never intended to strengthen the West but to destroy it. To have a multicultural society is to have no culture at all. Once the people’s sense of who they are is destroyed, the nation must follow with it. That is exactly what we see in the West as political classes struggle to perform their basic duties.

The reason for this, is that the people’s sense of who they are is what animates the political institutions of the state. That shared reality of a people is the soul of every nation, just as the soul animates the body. To kill it and simply try to artificially animate the body, is to create a Frankenstein’s monster. The modern Western state is now a collection of cultural parts robbed from graves around the world. It is neither organic nor natural, so it is always at war with normal human sensibilities.

Multicultural liberal democracy, when lying on the table, is ugly in appearance, but when animated it is truly horrifying. Multiculturalism becomes a monster that attacks everything around it, because at some level, like the mythical monster, it knows it is an abomination, a sin against creation. We have quickly moved from eradicating the people’s sense of identity to systemically eradicating the people. Instead of creating a new society, superior to the old, multiculturalism has destroyed the very essence of western society.

In addition to the end of the post-war cycle, we may also be at the end of a much longer cycle that began with the Enlightenment. The thinkers and philosophers who gave us liberal democracy had a mechanistic view of nature. This led them to see society as nothing but a collection of parts, like a watch. In order to make a better watch, the watchmaker simply had to improve its parts. Make a better spring or a better crystal and snap it into place. Liberal democracy is the full expression of this belief.

It turns out that human society is nothing like a watch and the people in it are not simply automata that can be tinkered with as necessary. Human society is the expression of the shared reality of the people. That shared reality is the result of actions, experiences and mating decisions made by their ancestors. Who they are is what they are. The Frenchman is French, because his ancestors were French, not because the map maker said he was born in France. The nation is the manifestation of this reality.

The confluence of these two end cycles, plus others forces like demographics and technology has brought us to this interregnum. The reason the ruling elites helplessly lash out at the gnats whirling about them is they are built for an age that is fading into the past. Their weapons are crude and destructive, but ultimately ineffective at halting the march into the abyss. The weird nostalgia of American politics is just another aspect of that effort to halt the momentum. It’s an effort to stop the clock.

Similarly, the incoherence and confusion among dissidents is due to the inability to break free from the Enlightenment ideas of liberal democracy. Those looking for an alternative, rummage around in the past for prior rejections. First it was the neo-reaction trying to revive the age of kings. Then it was the alt-right trying to revive 20th century fascism. Like clothes from a prior era, they were a poor fit and made the wearer look odd. They are answers to questions no one remembers, not the questions of today.

That’s why the on-going efforts to put Buckley Conservatism back together will fail. It was an answer to an old question. Similarly, libertarianism is in crisis, because it was a set of tools made for a tradesman who is no longer needed. Whether it is an effort to impose the old forms on the new opposition or re-brand the old stuff as a new form of nationalism, the effort must fail as it is an artifact of the past. The emerging opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy will be rooted in a rejection of its core principles, not an embrace of them.

Right-Wing Activism

Posted on June 23, 2019 by thezman

Political and social activism is most effective when it reveals some moral contradiction hidden from public view, reveals perfidy by the ruling class or exposes some immoral activity by the rich and powerful. Activism is about changing the moral battle space so that the critics appear to have the high ground, while their targets appear to have something to hide. What the activist is doing is using morality to even the fight, but also using the disparity in power to amplify their moral claims against their opponent.

Every movie or documentary about activists takes great pains to portray the activists as plucky and sincere. They are driven by a hunt for truth or justice. They sacrifice for their cause in order to right some wrong. Meanwhile, the target is always big and powerful, motivated by lower instincts like greed, ego or power. It’s why the rich and powerful, who bankroll left-wing street activism, take pains to launder their money and support through not-for-profit front groups like Propublica.

There is another component to effective activism that may be the most important in the modern media battle space. That is the element of surprise. Those posters someone created that read, “It’s OK To Be White” worked because the Left did not see it coming. They were unprepared for how to react to it. Worse yet, their normal instinct to surround a threat and scream at it compounded the problem. By calling it heresy, which is what they mean by racist, they revealed their moral contradictions.

The street artist Sabo works a similar angle. The Left has a big blind spot when it comes to the arts. They assume they have a monopoly on artistic expression, because so many of their cult members pretend to be artistic. It is a bit of the self-flattery that is integral to modern Progressivism. Sabo turns that against them with clever and very well done guerrilla street art that lampoons liberal self-regard. Not all of it is effective, but some of it hits the Left where they never bother to defend themselves.

This is something right-wing activist need to consider, especially when it comes to guerrilla tactics like street actions. Unlike the left-wing activists, which have the full support of the ruling class, the Right must always be looking for soft targets. The Left can mass up a bunch of zombies to fill a street and have their media organs broadcast it around the world. The Right must operate like guerrilla fighters, probing for weak spots in the perimeter, so the actions have to be small and precise.

For example, the Left is largely blind to the realities of immigration. For them, it is a purely moral issue at this point. They don’t even understand the financial interests of people like the Koch Brothers or the Silicon Valley oligarchs. That’s a pretty big blind spot that can be exploited. Instead of a banner drop over a highway, a better target is the apartment complex that runs migrant flophouses on behalf of local employers. It’s a soft spot that is undefended and the Left is not prepared to react.

This is one of those issues that angers middle-class white people. They don’t know about these flop houses, often operating on their edge of their towns. They don’t know the mechanics of smuggling in these indentured servants from India to work in programming shops and engineering firms. That’s never presented on Fox News, because the Murdochs would never allow it. Revealing the perfidy of the ruling class by bringing these flophouses to public view will rustle the right people.

That’s just an easy example of low-hanging fruit that dissidents tend to ignore. The Left is so powerful and so explicit in how it wields power, it has a gravitational force. It draws even its harshest critics into it, so they must fight on left-wing terms. Immigration becomes a moral issue pitting the romantic immigrant narrative against the cold-hearted nativists over what to do with illegal immigration. The real opportunity, however, is legal immigration, which has a much greater impact on white people.

The thing that right-wing activists need to keep in mind is their target audience is often incredibly naive about the world. The reason so many college kids fall for the TPUSA scam is they grew up in nice suburban neighborhoods with nice bourgeois parents, who think we still live in an orderly republic. More important, the people in charge are very good at concealing the truth from these people through control of the media. As a result, even though the result of the great replacement are all around them, they don’t see it.

The most red-pilling act is when that hidden reality is suddenly made plain. Tell the typical Baby Boomer about books being banned or banks closing down accounts of political activists and their blood boils. Even though this stuff is plastered all over social media, they don’t see it, because they are trained not to see it. For most of their lives, banning books is what happened in backward communist countries, not in a place like America. There was never a reason to think about it.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind for all dissidents. The shared reality of the modern age is carefully and effectively manipulated to keep people blind to what’s happening around them. The people running the media are good at their craft. That’s why guerrilla tactics like those “It’s OK To Be White” were so effective. The people in charge have grown used to a predictable enemy. They don’t know how to respond to those sorts of tactics. That’s their weak spot that can be exploited.

June Grab Bag

Posted on June 21, 2019 by thezman

Being new to the monetization game, I’m learning things about the world that I never put thought into until now. I went to the P.O. Box for the first time last week and discovered it was full of letters and donations. I must admit, I was taken aback by it. Like most people, I don’t get much of anything in the mail these days. I get the occasional notice from a government agency or something from our corporate overlords, but otherwise the mail is junk. Most days, all of it ends up in the trash.

Opening old fashioned envelopes with handwritten notes inside was something I have not done in so long it was like learning a new skill. There really is something different about reading a handwritten letter, even a printed one, that is different from reading an e-mail or comment. It is similar to the difference between reading a book or newspaper versus reading on-line. Maybe it is just nostalgia, but there is a difference. It’s not just the tactile sensation of it. The brain seems to work different too

Initially I though the right thing to do was to send thank you notes, but most of the correspondence did not have a return address. The point, for most, is to maintain anonymity, so that makes sense. I abandoned the thank you card idea and thought a roster of first names and states, but maybe that’s not a good idea. While I noodle over that, thank you to all of those sending donations and words of encouragement through to the post office box. You know who you are.

Now, for Subscribestar members, I am putting a little content up there on the weekends, just as an experiment in paywall content. I’m not sure where I want to go with the donor content just yet, so I’m in my experimental phase right now. I think at some point I will just create a premium space here for all donors and subscribers, but I’ll play around with the Subscribestar site for a while as I experiment with different ideas. I’m a big believer is measuring twice, in order to cut once. I’m also open to suggestions.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Great Debates (Link)
12:00: Libertarian Bashing (Link)
22:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
32:00: Brown Triumphalism (Link) (Link)
42:00: Comedy Is Not Funny (Link) (Link)
47:00: Juneteenth (Link)
52:00: Horns of A Dilemma (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/raqEQxAhdW8

The Biden Buggy

Posted on June 20, 2019 by thezman

In 2016 there was the Trump Train, now we have the Biden Boat or, given his age, the Biden Buggy. According to all of the polls, even those in keys states, Joe Biden is the clear favorite to win the nomination. He’s polling at around 30%, which is twice his nearest rival. In fact, the latest batch has him with three times the support of Bernie Sanders, who has been in the second seat for a year now. Everyone else is in single digits, bobbing up and down with the news cycle.

Of course, there is a lifetime between now and the first votes. For a guy like Biden, who is pushing eighty, that could be literally true. He is by far the oldest man to run for the nomination and would be the oldest man to enter the White House if he won. Trump set the record when he was elected in 2016, but Biden is a decade older. It remains to be seen if the media will allow that to be an issue. Right now they seem to be tasked with selling good old Uncle Joe to the voters, as the sensible antidote to Trump.

In fairness, Biden really is the Democrat version of Trump. They appeal to the same demographic. Biden has been pitching himself as “working class Joe” for close to a century now. It’s his go-to line whenever he is out campaigning. He tells voters about how everyone has known him as “working class Joe” or sometimes he uses the phrase “lunch pail Joe.” The fact that he has never done a minute of honest labor in his life never seems to matter. The old working class whites like it.

Like Trump in 2016, Biden is the last dance for a demographic about to disappear over the horizon. Trump found a way to win over voters, who remember back to All In The Family with fondness. Either they remember their dad as the Archie Bunker type or they were the Archie Bunker type. Biden is making a similar appeal, but with a decidedly romantic tone that recalls the Democrats past, when they talked about a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage. When the party was white and male.

While Democrats still need white votes, they are now the party of non-whites and increasingly the party of anti-whites. That’s probably what has all those old union types scrambling onto the Biden Buggy. They are tired of having to vote for someone that hates them. They are tired of pretending they are embracing their dispossession. It’s their last chance to have one of their guys at the top of the ticket. That’s why stories like this work for Biden. It sells to working class whites.

The risk, of course, is that this sort of talk will alienate black voters, who now make up 25% of the Democrat primary. Biden is considered a righteous honky, because he was Obama’s Stepin Fetchit for eight years, but blacks are notoriously fickle. If Harris can get some traction, they could easily abandon Biden for her out of racial loyalty. This stuff can also rustle the females, who are already worried about Joe and his habit of sexually assaulting women in public. Women are close to 60% of the Democrat vote.

Even so, the Biden bubble fits with a pattern in Democratic politics that goes back to the Reagan years. They looked at Reagan’s victories and concluded they needed to go Hollywood, which they did in a major way. The modern chat show format, for example, is a result of Clinton era media strategy. After Bush won in 2004, using a quantitative approach to reaching voters, they went all in on “big data” to elect Obama. After Trump beat Clinton in 2016, they will look for their Trump this time.

One challenge for team Biden is how to run as the nostalgia candidate, while pretending to be the candidate of the future. Given that his future will end at any minute, his credentials on the issue are not very good. More important though, the Left is about the glorious tomorrow, not the forgotten past. Look at their successful leaders and they were young and endlessly yapping about the future. Joe Biden may be as old as JFK, but he is no John Kennedy. He’s more like Walter Mondale.

The obvious challenge for Biden is his age. In his prime, he had a habit of saying nutty things that sunk his previous presidential ambitions. As he has aged, the tendency to say crazy old guy stuff has gotten out of hand. Like the habit of feeling up girls on stage and smelling their hair, his public utterances make people uncomfortable. For a man pushing eighty, weird public statements and moments of confusion will give even the most enthusiastic Baby Boomer pause.

His handlers have kept him under control, for the most part, by keeping him away from the public and the press. The media will do what the party tells them, but it is not hard to imagine some young ambitious activist working for the Post or the Times accidentally asking Biden the wrong question. At the debates next week, you can be sure the other candidates will try to get the old guy off his game, hoping he has a senior moment that will remind the public he was in office before they were born.

This is why the media activists are pumping air in the tries of the Warren campaign. She is the fall back candidate for when the party has to take the keys away from the Biden Buggy and put Uncle Joe in a home. She is no spring chicken herself, but her handlers are not wiping oat meal off her chin either. Her new economic pitch is aimed at the same old white people Biden is attracting with his lunch pail Joe act. That and she can appeal to angry single women and the snotty cosmopolitans.

It speaks to the age that both parties in the 2020 presidential election will be running explicitly nostalgic campaigns. Trump is a crude reboot of the Reagan years. His new slogan, Keep America Great, is a call back to the Morning in America ads Reagan used on his re-election campaign. Biden and maybe Warren are running as throwbacks to another age, when Democrats were the party of working class whites. Despite the celebrations for the browning of America, everyone seems to miss the old days.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I know have a PayPalsetup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

The Long Road

Posted on June 19, 2019 by thezman

A familiar phenomenon in dissident circles is for the super-black-pilled to come out of the woodwork, anytime someone suggests reforming the system in any way. They will properly inform the reformists that the current system is beyond hope. Either the problems are past the point where reform can work, or the system is so corrupt reform is impossible. There is a sense in some corners of the dissident right that even talking about engaging politics is corrupting. This Spandrell post is an example

Another spin on this is to write-off all political actors as gatekeepers, assigned by the state to prevent dissidents from changing minds. The alt-right boys tend to go down this road, finding a way to describe figures like Nigel Farage as insufficiently authentic, because they hold some positions they don’t like. These guys are super-black-pilled on Trump right now, because he turned out to be a politician. It is another way of rejecting engagement in politics, as a pointless and possibly complicit activity.

This is an age old problem for outsider politics. Radicals in the past argued that engagement in formal politics was an endorsement of those politics and as a result, a sellout of the movement. There are still some IRA-types holding out against the Good Friday Agreement. Various communist movements in South America would suffer from schisms, because one faction wanted to join the political process as a party, while the other faction wanted nothing short of a communist revolution.

The salient question for modern dissidents is whether dissidents should engage in formal politics. Was it a good thing for Nigel Farage to win the EU elections, or did it prevent something better from happening? Is it better for Trump to win in 2020 or will it just prevent progress on dissident causes? In the case of Trump, since it is a future issue, is it better for dissidents to back some other candidate, in order to demonstrate to white voters that fake nationalism is a loser and can never be tolerated?

The answer becomes even more complicated if you accept, as is the case for most dissidents, that there is no electoral way out of the troubles created by electoral politics. That is, the solution to liberal democracy is not at the ballot box. The ballot box is the problem, so its perpetuation is a continuation of the problem. Logically, participating in the democratic process means perpetuating that which you oppose. Even if that is not correct, and it is not correct, there is that sense of hypocrisy hanging over it.

There’s also an unspoken truth that plays a big part in the debate. Politics is a form of ritualized combat. The groups form up, lock shields and do battle. For those in the groups, there is that sense of shared suffering and shared triumph that can only be achieved in group activity. For dissidents in America, for example, to participate in Trump’s campaign, feels like a temptation. They are getting the short term joy of that group activity, at the expense of the long term goals of their movement.

The danger of disconnecting from conventional politics, whether in the formal sense, as in elections, or the informal sense, as in meta-politics, is self-ghettoization. This has always been the problem with white identity politics in America. It has existed as a sub-culture that is out of tune with the rest of white America. Whenever they pop up in public, they seem weird and alien. In Europe, far-right politics suffered the same problem, usually devolving into fascists cults without a coherent reason to exist.

So, there is the dilemma. On the one hand, engaging in conventional politics runs the risk of expending energy on pointless and discouraging ventures that could possibly corrupt the movement and the dissidents. On the other hand, not participating runs the risk of becoming a weird sub-culture that has no impact on the culture war. Instead, it becomes a reason to do nothing, but congratulate one another on their isolation from the dominant political culture. Either road appears to be a dead end.

The reason this dilemma exists, is dissident politics, at least in America, has never matured beyond the juvenile state. In the post-war years, Buckley-style conservatism started as a legitimate reaction to radicalism, but never matured beyond a parlor game, so it was easily co-opted. The reaction to it, paleo-conservatism, went down the engagement path, but was always reactionary in nature. It never matured past being a long critique of liberal democracy. It was commentary, rather than a movement.

In contrast, the New Left that emerged in the 1960’s, from the remains of communist movements in the prior generation, did mature past this point. As a result, it was able to engage in politics, as the corrupter, rather than the corrupted. At the same time, it was able to stand apart from politics, providing a long running argument against it. The New Left was successful as a political movement because it had a clear agenda, taking over the institutions, and a clear purpose, to turn those institutions into weapons.

Modern dissidents, of course, face a very different battle space than the leftists of the past century. The New Left faced an establishment that was more or less sympathetic to at least some of their goals. They also could free-ride on other movements like black civil rights and the anti-war movement. They were also working in an industrial state, not a technological surveillance state. These are all critical differences that make the New Left a bad example for modern dissidents.

Still, it is a starting point for dissidents. The movement has to mature past the point of confusing activity with goals. A mature and self-aware movement will instinctively understand that the agenda is fluid and immediate, but also subservient to the larger goals of the movement. For example, if supporting a particular candidate weakens the opposition or advances some small part of the agenda, then engaging in politics is correct. If there is nothing to be accomplished in a given cycle, then sitting it out is correct.

The point being is that for a mature dissident movement, politics, whether reformists or adversarial, are about the larger goals. Trump winning election is not an end, but one of many opportunities to weaken the resolve of the people in charge and rally those who oppose them. Once that utility has been extracted, then the political activity of supporting Trump loses its value. This is true of activism and meta-politics. The goal is always to weaken the resolve of the other side, while boosting the spirits of dissidents.

The radical’s long march through the institutions was not implacably dogmatic. They compromised and adjusted, doing what they must to win each small battle, often turning defeat into a bloody-shirt to rally the faithful. Dissidents will need to make a long march through white bourgeois culture. It is not about capturing the institutions, but about capturing the foundation upon which they must rest. The New Left scaled the walls to capture the city. Dissidents will need to tunnel underneath it.

If you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. I know have a PayPal setup for those who prefer that method to donate. Thank you for your support!

Immigration Agitation

Posted on June 18, 2019 by thezman

According to news reports, the Trump administration is preparing a big sweep of illegal immigrants. Trump was supposedly tweeting about it. According to the news, the plan is to “round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.” Most likely, the plan is to include lots of tips to local media in an effort to get maximum attention for the effort. Of course, when the problem involves tens of millions, using the term “mass arrests” when rounding up thousands is a bit of a stretch.

Those on the patriotic immigration beat will no doubt look at this with skepticism, as it is mostly a show. These people, once arrested, will have to go through the normal deportation process. Since that has been bogged down by corrupt judges and lawyers, that process will take years. Meanwhile, the people arrested will be set free, so the effect will have been to take these people to a field trip to a federal building. The illegal invaders themselves will lose whatever fear they have of being deported.

That’s the age old problem with bluffing. Once the bluff is called, all future bluffs are worthless. In fact, they become a tell, of sorts. The person prone to empty threats can be manipulated, as everyone knows what they won’t do once they start making threats about what they will do unless something happens. A threat is only useful if the person making it has credibility. In the minds of billions of people, the threat of deportation from America is no longer credible. They know it is a bluff.

Team Trump and maybe even Trump himself, thinks this is a great way to mollify the base on the immigration issue. The usual rage heads in conservative media will play along, calling this some great move by Trump to address the issue. No doubt, the types of people still wearing MAGA caps will fall for it. They are mostly older voters, conditioned to go along with whatever the television tells them. The more jaded, however, are likely to react the opposite way, seeing it as another Trump con.

That said, political theater is always aimed at the gullible. Most white people calling themselves Progressives don’t watch MSNBC, for example. They will read the NY Times and the Washington Post, but they look at the cable airheads the same way most dissidents look at the Fox News rage heads. Political theater is aimed at the dullards, because the dullards need it. Otherwise, they will stop paying attention and wander off somewhere. No doubt, Trump gets that, so he does a lot of political theater.

All that said, the skeptics should probably not get carried away. The main issue with immigration is ignorance. The people in charge and their media organs have done an amazing job of hiding the problem in plain sight. Most white people in America have noticed the invasion in their cities and towns. They notice the complexion of their kid’s school changing. Yet, the mass media has done an amazing job of keeping them from really noticing it. In fact, people have been conditioned to embrace it.

When Trump talks about immigration or when he stages one of these public relations ventures, it chips away at that conditioning. Immigration, not just the invaders, but all immigration, is one of those subjects that is best never discussed, if you are the people in charge. It is one of those topics that the more people understand, the angrier they get about it. There is no good way to sell open borders to normal people, so the media is instructed to cover it up, by preventing any debate about it.

Additionally, any discussion of immigration opens the door to other taboo subjects, like the guest worker scams. As much as people get mad about Trump bellowing about how we need unlimited guest workers, what he is doing, in effect, is the agree and amplify response popular with dissidents on-line. His exaggerated enthusiasm is so incongruous, it breaks the normal pattern of discourse. Whether this is intentional or not, his meandering on immigration keeps the issue front and center.

Probably the best thing about these public relations stunts, however, is it opens the door to some obvious questions patriots can ask their Trump loving friends. For example, why is it legal for landlords to rent to foreign invaders? Why is it legal for Americans to help foreign invaders come into the country? Why are churches so excited to help invaders, but can’t be bothered to help poor blacks? Immigration opens the door for lots of jimmy rustling questions you can spring on your normie friends.

The Civil Rights Movement created many more racists than it cured, because it brought many whites into contact with blacks for the first time. All those middle-class white people who had to flee their neighborhoods for the suburbs took with them a hard lesson, even if there was no way to turn back the clock. The same is true with open borders. There could be no such thing as white identity politics without mass immigration. It exists due to this demographic catastrophe inflicted upon us.

That’s probably the hardest part about this for dissidents, as well as the immigration patriots in the civic nationalist sphere. There’s no “winning” in the conventional sense when it comes to immigration. The die is cast, as far as the demographics of the North America. The future is majority-minority, with large swaths of the continent off-limits, for all practical purposes, to white people. Debating immigration is an entry point for discussing an ideology built for what comes next, not what has already happened.

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Politics and Aesthetics

Posted on June 17, 2019 by thezman

The Democrats are about to kick-off their fashion show for picking their next presidential candidate, so the experts are trying to set the tone for the season. The fashion show is a good analogy at this stage. Designers don’t always come up with new styles that work with the public, so they try different things, hoping for one or two that work. They hope to come up with something that catches the attention of a taste-maker, like a Hollywood starlet, then all of a sudden they have a hit with the public.

Steve Jobs figured this out the second time around with Apple. It was not about cutting edge technology or making a better product. That was a field with too many big money smart players. His game was going to be as trend setter and taste-maker. He tailored the company to be the symbol of the smart set, the people who fashion themselves a cut above the masses. These are the people who determine the latest styles. The lowly music player soon became a fashion and cultural statement.

Politics often works the same way. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency largely on the cool factor. He was young, as far as Baby Boomers were concerned. He was also hip and cool. He played the sax on TV wearing sunglasses! Voting for Clinton became a fashion statement for the Left. Tony Blair played the same game in Britain with the “Cool Britannica” stuff. He was young and new and the future of Britain, despite being the man, who would usher in the end of Britain as an English country.

Politics and aesthetics are tightly wound together in any form of democracy, as selecting people for elected office is a popularity contest. The winner of the beauty pageant is not objectively better in some way than the others. She just has some way of appealing to the voters in the moment. The iPod was not some great innovation or invention. It just looked cool to the right people at the right time and became the standard for music players. Barak Obama was not a great statesman. He was just the right style at the time.

It’s not just left-wing politics in America that relies on an aesthetic to carry it forward with its supporters. In 1976 Ronald Reagan lost to the dour Gerald Ford in the Republican primary. The same Reagan won in 1980 and ushered in a great cultural revival called the Reagan Revolution. In 1976 men had sideburns and wore garish leisure suits. In 1986, men wore traditional men’s suits, bathed every day and kept themselves properly groomed. The political revolution had an aesthetic.

This has always been true in the era of liberal democracy. The two great movements of the early 20th century, fascism and Bolshevism, had distinct aesthetics. The quintessential communist a century ago was a shabby looking cosmopolitan, with round spectacles and a few too many phobias. In contrast, the quintessential fascist was the beer drinking bourgeoisie hooligan, who disdained books in favor of the Faustian existence. Both sides were fighting over an aesthetic, as much as for power.

This is an important thing to understand about politics in any age, but especially in this highly democratic age. It’s about flattery, as much as anything. The people flocking to your banner do so because it validates an opinion of themselves. This piece in the Atlantic, celebrating Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg is a good example. The intended audience for that article are the sort of people, who want to belief their politics are controlled by facts and reason, rather than superstition and emotion.

The fact that both Warren and Buttigieg are pseudo-intellectual posers is not only not a liability, but it is an asset. The people they seek to attract are themselves supercilious dilettantes and poseurs. They get their opinions from the MSNBC and NPR, while claiming to be avid readers of the New York Times. These are the people who decorate their apartments with books they never read. Around a real intellectual, they are made to feel inferior, but around Warren or Buttigieg they are validated.

The argument that the democrats are heavily reliant on the super educated is what’s called flattering the reader. Democrats rely on blacks, foreigners and white people too dumb to realize they are being destroyed. That is the base of the party now. Warren and Buttigieg know they have no shot at those voters, so they hope to win the beautiful people in the party. They may not connect with the rank and file, but they can appeal to the trend setters, who have the tools to convert that into popular appeal.

Another way to see the entanglement of politics and aesthetics is look at the street battles between the alt-right and Antifa. One side kitted themselves out as preppy suburban fascists. The other side was a comical mélange of Italian Black Shirts and skateboard park anarchists. Neither side had a coherent, positive identity, so they cherry-picked styles and symbols from past movements. They could just as easily have faced off with one side in leisure suits and the other side wearing spats.

In fact, what characterizes this period is the lack of a political aesthetic that is authentic and original. This is an interregnum, where the old order is slowly giving way, but a new order has yet to form. More precisely, the battles lines between the contestants for a new order have yet to form. Instead, it is one side protecting the status quo and one side dissatisfied with it. The former has no reason to defend the old order, other than habit, while the latter has no conception of what should come next.

If there is to be a coherent political and social movement rise out of the dissident right, it will have to be more than narrow political arguments and meta-political commentary on social media. It will need a look that signals to the curious that it is a movement with a future for itself and its adherents. Just as men in traditional suits signaled a break from the 1970’s and the radical chic of the New Left, the new aesthetic will have to signal a break from the old political paradigm and the old Progressive morality.

If you like living off the sweat of others, then ignore the following. On the other hand, if you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Or, PayPal.

Understanding The Left

Posted on June 15, 2019 by thezman

One of the strange contradictions of modern life is how the Right, generally defined as not-Left, is sure they understand the Left, while they are convinced the Left has no understanding of the Right. A standard job in Conservative Inc. is the position of explaining every event in terms of the Left’s motivation for or against it. Cable chat shows have a roster full of these guys they use to pad out their segments. Often, this is someone employed at some minor league operation in Conservative Inc.

The argument from the Right is that the Left controls everything, so it is impossible for normal people to escape left-wing proselytizing. At your work, it is angry single women and bitter minorities lecturing you on diversity. At school, it is the same, supplemented by emotionally unstable coeds. In pop culture, it is the usual suspects peddling the latest Progressive fads. There is no escaping the tidal wave of cultural and political sewage that gushes from the Left, so everyone understands it.

On the other hand, so the argument goes, the Left lives in their isolated bunkers, free of contrary opinion. This is why they are hell-bent on stifling opinion on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They wish to be free of dissent and have the ability to isolate themselves from it, so they live in ignorance of opinion and culture outside their bubbles. There is a lot of truth to this, given how they describe people like Gavin McInnes and Stephen Crowder as no different from very bad people like Mike Enoch and Richard Spencer.

The truth is though, the not-Left really does not understand Left at all. People outside the Left continue to believe, for example, that the Left has good and logical reasons for the things they do, like woke capitalism. In that post, Sailer goes through the possible reason for the sudden rise in wokeness, using statistical data to illustrate the emergence in the late Obama years. He does not settle on an explanation, but the underlying assumption is there is a good, or at least logical, reason for it.

Now, by good reason, it is not to imply morally good in an absolute, transcendent sense of the idea. The Unabomber had good reasons for sending bombs through the mail, at least as far as he was concerned. From his perspective, there was no good reason for not mailing bombs. As nutty as that was, it is comprehensible. The same can be said for logical reasons. They may not be, strictly speaking, logical, but they are at least understandable. The desire for power, sex, money and so forth.

This way to trying to understand the Left, however, has one flaw. The Left is not reasonable or even thinking through this stuff. There was no meeting at the NY Times back in the late Obama years where it was decided that they would run Emmett Till stories every time black crime became a national story. There was no meeting among the heads of Big Media to agree upon a strategy of pushing the Russian collusion hoax after the election. The Left is not motivated by good or logical reasons.

Instead, it is better to think of them as a school of fish. When you watch a school of fish or a flock of birds, that is another useful analogy, it appears as if they are coordinated in their actions. It’s as if one of the fish is the brain, operating in secret communication with the rest of the school, to have them dart left or right through the water. It’s almost as if they were designed to be of one mind. We know, however, that there is no conspiracy of fishes secretly controlling the school using secret communications.

Instead, it is one fish responding to the fish around him. When the fish on the outside of the school twitches, those around him twitch. The cascade of movement happens so fast it is imperceptible to the observer on the dock. The same is true of birds. That murmuration of a flock of starlings looks like a highly coordinated ballet, but in reality it is the result of a million reactions within the flock. That’s how the Left operates like a highly coordinated religious cult. They are tuned to react to one another.

This is why facts and reason are useless weapons against the Left. People in the 2A community have all had the experience of carefully explaining the facts and arguments of gun control to their lefty friend or relative. They nod along, seeming to understand what has been explained. The next time you see them, it is the same old shibboleths, as if they have no memory of the last conversation. The reason for this is the very definition of who they are is their membership in a civic religion.

A part of every religion is ritual. Even the crudest, most simple of religions have some rituals that reinforce the belief system. Those ceremonies and rituals are physical manifestations of the shared belief. Step inside a synagogue and it is nothing but ritual and ceremony. The same is true of the Catholic Church. Old religions have had a long time to develop and fine tune their rituals and ceremonies. Without those rituals, the religion ceases to exist, just as the death of the body kills the consciousness.

That is the power of Progressivism. It is a self-contained, self-validating shared reality for the adherents. It’s why so few people break from it. More important, its immune system has evolved highly complex defenses against the way in which the Right prefers to debate. Those appeals to facts and reason are quickly turned into fuel to energize the believers into huddling closer in common defense. It’s how the Left maintains its power. It has turned the enemy’s best weapons into fuel.

It is why engaging with the Left is a tactical error. As much as dissidents like to accuse the Buckley conservatives of being controlled opposition, they never really got the value of the Buckley types to the Left. They were not their designated punching bags. They were the ritualized manifestation of the devil, the universal threat against which the Left is organized. It is a reminder of why they believe, why they must stick together and why they must fight by any means necessary.

An authentic alternative to the Left will therefore not confront the Left, but hide from it, refusing to engage in the traditional way. More important, it can never manifest in the traditional ways. Those white boys in fashy haircuts at Charlottesville were the best controlled opposition the Left has had since David Duke. They were what the Progressive prophesies foretold, thus confirming the shared beliefs of the coalition of the ascendant. It’s why Charlottesville looms so large for the Left.

The authentic alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy will have to evolve in the shadows and evolve its own immunity from the weapons of the Left. Instead of being attracted to confronting the Left, it will have to be repelled by it. The decisive weapon will be never manifesting in a way that allows the Left to anathematize it. Instead of playing the role carved out for them by the Left, the successful dissidents will seem formless and inexplicable. The people in charge will never see them coming.

Open Borders!

Posted on June 14, 2019 by thezman

In the process of registering for this event, I had to interact with some of the beautiful people, who are trying to create a “new” nationalism. What struck me is just how far away we are from one another in terms of our politics. What passes for the “far right” among the Cloud People is pretty tame stuff. For example, the “new” far right is still not sure if we should end immigration. Some think open borders is fine, while others think some limits are OK, but otherwise nationalism means open borders.

Since the purpose of my attendance is to get some of these people to pay more attention to what dissidents are saying about the issues of the day, I thought a show about immigration was a good idea. I have not done a lot on the subject. I’m a zero immigration guy, so I tend to forget that most people are still making their mind up about this subject. New people heading our way are mostly coming for the identity politics stuff, but immigration is a big driver of it and a major concern for dissidents.

The first segment is twice the normal length and I may post this as a clip at some point, as it is the sort of thing to send to your friend in the Ben Shapiro fan club. In that first segment, I walk through all the different ways people can legally enter America. My guess is few people here know about all of the various visa programs. The typical normie knows nothing about the immigration system. I found it astounding that it took me 20 minutes to read all of it out loud and I take the time to learn this stuff.

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